


Harsh Realm

by bible



Category: Dark Avengers (Comic)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-17
Updated: 2014-03-17
Packaged: 2018-01-16 00:49:14
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,165
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1325506
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bible/pseuds/bible
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>I won't go whistle by your grave if you don't go whistle by mine.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Harsh Realm

**Author's Note:**

> Bullseye's dialogue is ripped from Punisher MAX.

"Lay down next to me. Don't listen when I scream."

A simple command. Daken sits up, anyway, and watches his bloodied knuckles twist in the cloth of his sheets. His pale fingers are quivering. There's a split in the back of his head, like someone tried to bring an ax against it. It keeps spilling red, even though Daken's cleaned it a lot. 

The hatchet's thrown halfway across the floor of his apartment. Bullseye's fingerprints, bathed in red, make their mark against the wood of the handle. 

Bullseye's crying into his pillow. His breath shakes with ragged shame. His back convulses violently. 

Daken finds it meditating to rest his cheek against his spine and draw his fingertips over his back. 

Lester literally cries himself to sleep.

* * *

 

Three hours ago, and Daken's driving down one highway in Long Island. He appreciates the world. The Atlantic has the moon hung over it, like it's suspended, like one big coin. 

Daken drives a nice car. A sleek model. The radio is turned to something with bass running through it, pulsing and jarring his system  _and_  the car. Very few lyrics. 

Mist carries over the road. It smells fresh outside, when he cracks the window. It rained earlier.

In the quickly lowering sun, he sees the silhouette of a man with an ax. Smoky lights on the street from gas lamps cast golden rays over the line of his bones. His head is bowed. A thumb is jutted out.

Daken pulls up next to Lester and rolls down the window the rest of the way, and sticks his head out. Lester's jaw is grit, and blood stains the cloth of his white t-shirt. The muscles of his arms ripple under the red light of a passing car.

The mutant runs his fingers through his hair. He laughs and calls him a name. His eyes are mocking. 

The blood that curves over the line of his cheekbone in droplets reminds him of rain drops on a rose petal. Lester can't meet his eyes. He turns his head and drops his gaze like a submissive girl.

His Adam's apple bobs when he tries to speak. He shuts his mouth. 

When he climbs into the car, he turns down the music. 

Daken lets him stain the car with blood.

* * *

They have to pull over when Bullseye tries to kill him. Daken pops his claws and holds them to his neck and realizes he's crying.

"What is  _wrong_  with you?" He demands, easing the ax from his grip that goes lax. Bullseye's shoulders sink.

He covers his face in his hands and they keep trembling.

"You start to see people as dead little puppets, dancing on strings, and how to pull them. How to cut them. And you wanna cry sometimes but someone might see you so you turn off all the lights and you try to cry but you can’t, and you’re so disgusted and you wanna hurt yourself so you get a knife and you’re gonna slit your wrist. But next thing you know you’re stabbing someone and you don’t even know who they are or why but you just keep doing it and doing it and doing it until there’s blood and guts all over everything, you know? Do you understand what I’m talking about?"

Daken takes his face in his hands and nuzzles his throat. "Yes," he purrs, "Yes, I understand what you're talking about." Slowly, the shiny black claws sink back into his skin, thin out in his body.

But what he wants to ask is:  _God, Lester, what did you do?_

* * *

His bedroom in the mornings after sharing the bed with someone isn't usually this somber. Lester has long since stopped crying. When Daken wakes him up, they kiss for a very long time.

They watch the news, and they find Rudy Parr, father of three, brutally murdered in a hotel lobby. The prostitute he hired describes the killer as having been light skinned, blue eyes, 6'2".

He should have killed her too. Lester frowns. But, he is already on the most wanted. It doesn't matter.

"I have to go," he whispers.

Daken turns off the television and pulls the blanket over them both. It's dark. When Daken slides up to him, and rests his slender fingers against his collarbone, and lay his head on his shoulder, Lester knows he needs to leave.

He doesn't. He stays.

* * *

Outside, the sun is hot. Leonard removes his baseball cap and glances at his foster dad. He's proud. There's tears of repletion on his face.

No hitter.

The batter mocks him. Lester wipes his eyebrow, and paints a bull's eye against the prefrontal cortex of his head, and aims. 

* * *

The recording has never been re-played on television. Daken hunts down a major fan of Leonard Poindexter and buys one of the many copies he's made for a ridiculous amount.

Then, he buys the baseball card for five times more.

* * *

In Hell's Kitchen, Daken smiles at the gravestone. He sets the laminated card in the ground. He kisses two fingers and presses it to the curve of the rock. Someday, he knows he will meet Daredevil, and he'll kill him.

* * *

In Avengers tower, Bullseye watches a baseball game. He sips from a can of beer. Mac's a cushion away, eating through various snack items. 

Outside, the sky is grey. The weather is damp. Bullseye commented, earlier, that grey days and clear nights were his favorite.

Daken sits close to Bullseye and makes some comment about baseball that offends Lester, because they start fighting afterwards.

He smiles around the blood caking his face. Daken smirks when Victoria pries them apart with the help of a few agents. They do this a lot.

Around the beam, Daken knows Lester's angry. The light doesn't reach his eyes. There's no gleam of any sort.

It's what he usually looks like after a kill.

* * *

That's what he thinks about, with Lester in his bed, with an ax on the floor and an arm wrapped loosely around his middle. He's never seen Lester so distressed about a lack of medication.

He wants to swallow pills. He wants to be in control. He says he loves to kill, but he's angry at himself, because that murder was sloppy and unplanned.

People mourned the man. His children and his wife.

In a few years, no one would mourn Lester.

* * *

When they come to clean out his apartment and collect his things once he’s passed on, all his personal items fills about half a cardboard box. The landlord is accused of stealing, because nobody could have lived this long and not have more to show for it. If they found an old and tattered baseball card of a murderer, they'd assume he was not that same person.

* * *

When Lester's been dead for ten years, Daken looks the same.

In his room, he touches the DVD of his baseball game, the ax. 

He smiles at the Bullseye mask, and kisses it.

**Author's Note:**

> I can't write Daken for the life of me, but an abundance of role-playing Bullseye in the past few months has helped me write him better.


End file.
